Suckers?

[tacoma]

While trout fishing today I noticed a school of some rather large suckers. Tried catching a few to spice the uneventful day up but came up blank. Are there any tricks to catching them...I think I threw everything in the tackle box at them, except the M-80's...just joking!

[noresman]

Where were you fishing? I was at the Swift Sunday and saw the same thing. They're schooling up ready for spawning. I used to catch them on crawlers in the westfield river when I was a kid. I grew up in West Springfield back then the river was a sewer. You had three paper mills in a row in West Side, Strathmore,Southworth, and Premoid. The only thing that lived in the river then was suckers, carp and eels. Your joke about the m-80 made me laugh.We used to tape bee-bee's around m-80's and throw them into the schools of suckers and see how many floated away. We were sadistic little kids!!!

[tacoma]

Thats great...we have all done some sort of damage with an M-80. I was at Wyola Lake in Shutesbury. There were some pretty big suckers swimming around. I tried power bait, worms, and salmon eggs while resting them on the bottom hoping they would bite but nothing. If I had dynomite I could have got like 20 of them.

[joem]

When suckers are in the spawning mode they dont feed much .You may get an occasional one if you put bait (worm or natural nymph) right under their nose.You are seeing them because they are on the spawning run.

[big big rdg]

Get out the frog spearWink1

[dana_c]

Spear? Barbarian! Civilized folk use bows.

Went bow fishing on the Swift years ago. Got a sack full. Now what?

Buried 'em in Mom's garden - great tomato fertilizer... Neighborhood cats dug 'em all up...messy...

Last year on the --- branch of the Swift I was working upstream when I saw salmon leaping upstream, over a beaver dam. SALMON??? Nah, suckers. Didn't have my bow. Probably a good thing.

DAana

[tuna]

I've found that when they hit, they usually do it when you just leave your bait alone. I've always had good "luck" getting them on worms just plunked in - they always tend to wake me up and disturb my daydreams.

[Toad]

Get out the frog spearWink1

About FROG SPEARS!!!!!!Bash1

Smoke1

[JayW]

HAHA these are some great stories. A part of the Westfield River runs behind my house through the woods and we used to catch them things during the summer when we were really bored. Those things used to scare the hell out of us because there were so many of them and the size of the teeth on those guys. Anyways we would tread into the shallow water and then manage to flip them onto the rocks on shore by using sticks and anything else we could find. They smelled so gross I wanted to Yuck1 . Besides them we used to find all sorts of gross stuff floating in the river which Ill save for another time.

[Toad]

As a kid I would spend all my time over there. Porter Lake and all the duck ponds are tributaries that turn into a stream down around the lily pads. That had and still does have several bridges to get across the stream.

Well one day we had some m-80's, tapped them to rocks. We threw them in the deeper holes and, WHAM, shocked bullhead and the like would float to the top. We just walked to one of the bridges and scooped them up as they floated by!Grinning1

After that we got the M-80's for free. My Dad loved fresh bullhead deep fryed with a corn meal crust. So he would by the m-80's for us and say, "Goin Fishing?"Tongue1

Smoke1

[WhiteFeather]

When I was a wee lad I used to hunt frogs in the ponds at Forest Park with a BB gun. My mom and dad loved frog's legs but I never told them where I got em.

[noresman]

Bullhead and Frogs legs are both very good. When i was a kid my dad and I would spend most every weekend camping at Brimfield Reservoir. After supper we would go out and plug for bass and listen for the bullfrogs and sneak up on them and whack-em with the boat oar. Then we would go catch a bunch of bullhead bring them back to camp and fry up the frogs legs and wrap the bullhead in foil with some salt and pepper and throw them in the coals of the fire. Man they were good. Don't know if I'd eat anything out of Forest Park.